


the closest closeness

by ursahelianthus



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Flignettes, I read Heidegger while writing this, Not much plot, Season 2 post-eps, all Flynn POV vignettes, feat. herbal tea and character development, hence the brooding, increasingly brooding about Lucy, mostly brooding, now with added quantum mechanics, sorry - Freeform, this fic also inspired by angsty poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-08 01:03:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15919788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ursahelianthus/pseuds/ursahelianthus
Summary: It gives him to understand that the way to make sense of his new life, to make sense of his place here, to make the world coherent again and know the right thing to do, is to make sense of Lucy.Or: on Flynn properly joining the bunker family.





	1. Post-The Salem Witch Hunt

Hours after the rest of the bunker has gone to sleep, Flynn is still up, sitting in a too-small chair at a too-small table, reading about the Salem Witch Revolt. He had fun being back on the job, roaming freely and amassing a hoard of antique rifles on his first day out in over six months, but he killed more people today. Saved people too, which was new, and on the balance it looks like history had fewer murders but Flynn himself only just broke even.

And then there was Lucy. Watching her, working with her, stifling the absolute dread that momentarily paralyzed him when her own mother accused her of being a witch. Then saving her, stitching her up, making sure Agent Christopher ordered the strongest antibiotics known to God and the CDC for her. His first mission and he lets Lucy get within five yards of the gallows before being knifed by a Puritan. 

Flynn did get her out though, and he doesn’t know yet how this team goes about reckoning and adjudication, but hopefully they’ll call it square as well. Even though no one’s voluntarily spoken to him since they got back from Salem. What was he thinking, hope is futile. He closes the book, pinching the bridge of his nose. He’s halfway through a surreal chapter about himself, and this whole day is giving him a headache. 

The bunker is far nicer than his single room in prison, but Flynn is still effectively alone. He doesn’t let himself think _lonely._ He tries not to wonder whether being around people who hate him is going to be worse than being entirely isolated. He tries harder to not wonder if Lucy already regrets her decision to trust him. He’s about to give up and go to bed when she walks into the kitchen, breaking his solitude as if he had summoned her with his wallowing. Speak of the Devil. 

Lucy’s not here for him, of course. She squints at Flynn and the harsh lights, then skirts around his table to fill a glass at the sink, cradling her left arm. She drinks half the glass before setting it down. He thought she’d be passed out from the various types of trauma she suffered today, but when she turns to face him, her eyes are sharp. She leans her hip against the counter and regards him coolly, without sympathy but also without anger or accusation. He lets her look, curious to see what she’ll do. He’s wary, but not about to go on full offense or lockdown when it’s Lucy standing in front of him. It’s not like he has much to lose anyway.

She definitely doesn’t look like she’s about to thank him for saving her life or patching up her first stab wound. Good. She doesn’t owe him anything, and she knows it. He can see her gearing up to say something, though. She is the bravest of them.

“Flynn,” she says. Her voice is soft but unyielding. “Everything you’ve done to us, everything we’ve done to you – it can’t all be forgiven today. But you’re a part of this team now, whether any of us likes it or not.” She stands up straight. “You’d be justified in not wanting anything to do with us, but we’re going to need each other, and I just-” she hesitates, a trace of vulnerability flashing in her features. “I understand pain too, so that we do have in common.”

And just like that, he has Lucy.

She is the kindest of them too. It gives him to understand that the way to make sense of his new life, to make sense of his place here, to make the world coherent again and know the right thing to do, is to make sense of Lucy. This whole war has always turned on Lucy, and so too does their resistance, and so too would he. Everything else would follow from that. 

Lucy holds his gaze, her dark eyes unfathomable, and he builds his world back up around that point of calm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The working title of this series was “Flynn/Heidegger ramblings” - this note is more of the same, so feel free not to read it. 
> 
> But to give credit where credit is due, Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher whose most famous book, _Being and Time_ , analyzes the nature of being and meaning. For Flynn's perspective I borrow a lot from Heidegger's views on being-in-the-world, how we are fundamentally relational and always contextualized, authenticity and choosing possibilities, un/familiarity, and being-towards-death (the passage from whence I stole my title). Heidegger is also famous for a torturous form of super dense and technical writing with lots of invented words that sort of makes your brains leak out of your ears. Again, sorry. Not really though. I think phenomenology would appeal to Flynn.


	2. Post-The Kennedy Curse

Flynn goes a little faint with relief when he marches past Agent Christopher and sees Lucy awake and standing near the controls. She is pale but alert, and Flynn lets go of some of the tension he’s been carrying this entire mission away from her. He’s been on edge for days, ever since Lucy’s wound became infected despite her mainlining antibiotics that could tranquilize a rhino. Her fever had progressed frighteningly fast, and he’d been hovering uselessly at her bedside when it spiked to a temperature that usually demands an express trip to the ER. Lucy had passed out in the middle of a delirious observation about parentheses and how he never uses his smile lines for smiling, and she hadn’t so much as twitched when the Mothership alarm went off almost twenty-four hours later. 

Flynn smiles at Lucy now, partly because he’s glad to see her significantly less close to death, and partly to prove he can, although she probably doesn’t recall their last conversation. Lucy doesn’t smile back, but she looks similarly relieved to see that he’s returned unharmed from being abandoned in the past. Actually, upon second inspection, she looks troubled and a bit haggard, beyond what could be attributed to recovering from a seventeenth-century illness. JFK couldn’t have been that bad, could he? Kid seemed polite enough, though to be fair he was unconscious for most of their acquaintance. 

With some astonishment, Flynn finally registers that Lucy’s wearing his suit jacket, and his smile turns into a smirk as he quirks his eyebrow at her. She just shrugs, which confuses the hell out of him, though he’s also aware of a burst of smug possessiveness that he’s not proud of but can’t do anything about. The jacket can’t be a fashion statement, oversized and awkward as it is, and it definitely can’t be an I’m-his-girlfriend type statement. It definitely could be absolutely nothing. Certainty is out and ambiguity is in: the only statement Flynn is currently prepared to make regarding any aspect of his life. 

The important thing is that Lucy’s up and ambulatory and presumably no longer running a fever nearly hot enough to cook brain cells. While this is excellent progress, she’s also standing as far as possible from one Jessica Logan, whose presence in the bunker must be the most targeted and petty type of torture that time travel (and Wyatt) has wrought on anyone so far. 

Flynn decides to move along before anything unsavory happens and he’s blamed just for standing there. A tactical retreat, he tells himself. Plus, he needs time to figure out how to check that Lucy still has all the correct memories. Flynn had vehemently opposed going on this mission without her, not least because they’d be flying blind without a historian. The greater risk was that if they left her behind and changed a key piece of history (like Kennedy’s continued existence past seventeen), she wouldn’t be included in the Lifeboat loophole that allowed them to remember the original timeline. She’d be a historian from the altered timeline, which would seriously screw the team over for subsequent missions, and screw Lucy over in terms of having her life tossed upside down yet again. Her sister might even be erased from her memory since Amy never existed in their current timeline, although he still remembers Amy from the journal, which Lucy technically has yet to write. At this juncture, Lucy’s possibly altered memory seems like a delicate subject to broach; though she’s a gracious comrade and housemate, it’s more of her resting state and not an indication that they’re on heart-to-heart terms.

 

Later that night, after a hot shower and a cold dinner, Flynn finds himself in his battered armchair, fretting over Lucy once again, going around and around in his head like he used to when all he had of her was an admittedly unhealthy obsession with her journal. He’s not accustomed to being stuck on one person or one fact or one problem like this, seeing as he’s spent most of his professional life being forced to adapt to new and changing situations, usually at extremely high speed in order to avoid an even speedier death. Successfully surviving in any particular place depended on learning the people there, learning the established ways, and then either following along to blend in or deliberately disrupting the order to achieve an objective. Flynn has always been able to intuitively understand why people do as they do – individual motivations, cultural norms, social uprisings. The ability clearly doesn’t transfer to his personal life, but it makes him a versatile and valuable field asset, a utility player for shadowy government organizations. 

Early on the NSA realized they could relocate him to almost any place (and, as it turned out, any time) where he could pass as a local, and within days he’d look so at home that people would stop him on the street to ask for directions. Accordingly, Flynn generally considers himself a man who is in the world and of the world – a part and a product of his environment, wherever that may be. The trick to it was refining a natural human propensity for making the unfamiliar familiar. Given enough time, in however strange or hostile a place, most people’s brains simply start ignoring things it has seen or heard or smelled before, a sort of selective blindness where only new or useful or dangerous things ping on the radar and the rest become background noise. Flynn had moved around more than most people, and so had developed both a more sensitive radar and a keener sense for discerning whether something that catches his attention is actually critical information. Even so, the evolutionary gift of adaptation tended to make extraordinary things routine. Even a foxhole becomes a dwelling, even a gunfight is another day at the office, even a wife is occasionally taken for granted.

This bunker though, it’s functionally both out of place and out of time, an anomaly unconnected to society at large or even reality as the rest of the world knows it. A few idiosyncrasies have become normal – lighting the stove with a match, adding four extra gallons of water to the creaking washing machine, periodically emptying the old bucket they use to catch leaks from a crack in the ceiling of their supposedly bomb-proof fallout shelter. As for the team and all the rest, it’s not fading into the realm of the ordinary, and Flynn has yet to get a handle on how to be a local here. He’s perplexed and off-balance in this metal fishbowl, and Lucy – well, journal or not, she’s the most intriguing enigma and most impenetrable black box he’s ever met. She still pings every day, every time she walks into a room, every time she speaks. His brain insists on flagging her again and again (red flags, white flags, flags of undisclosed meaning), and really, who is he to disregard that. She’s out on the couch right now.


	3. Post-King of the Delta Blues

Maybe the mission went better than Flynn thought, or maybe Lucy said something to the rest of the team, because now every once in a while one of them works up the nerve to talk with him like he’s a regular human person. 

Mason is first. It’s long past midnight on a rare good day, and Lucy is asleep in Flynn’s bunk, adorably rumpled in her flannels and still a little flushed from the drinks she’d had. Flynn is watching her contentedly from his beaten-up armchair, loathe to fall asleep and miss this moment of peace, when all at once the desolation he’s managed to hold at bay crashes back over him with the force of a seismic wave. His throat closes without warning and his chest feels like it’s being crushed; he’s tearing up from the pressure, unable to think, unable to breathe. When his brain’s demand for oxygen finally reaches his seized-up lungs, he’s gasping and nearly hyperventilating as he staggers from his room into the hall. Only the emergency lights are on at this hour, and the VCR clock blinks 3:24 AM in green block numbers as he collapses onto the couch. 

He presses his hands to his face to stop their shaking, knowing there’s nothing he can do except ride out the worst of it. The pain is spectacular. Deafening. He misses Lorena and Iris, he loves them, he fights tooth and nail for them, but he really thought he was done with drowning in grief over them. 

This encore of despair – did Lucy bring it on? Flynn sees a flash of her pale cheekbone in the dim moonlight, her hair across his pillowcase, the bridge of her nose, the bow of her lip. He’s been halfway in love with her for ages, though he tried desperately not to be. For two years he practiced wanting nothing at all, relinquishing anything he would miss before he could lose it. His traitorous heart went ahead and latched on to Lucy anyways the second he met her again, frightened but defiant in the flames of the Hindenburg. Lately her face is clearer in his mind’s eye than Lorena’s, and he’s not sure what to do with his guilt except hold on to it, if only because he can’t yet set it down. He’s happier than he deserves.

Flynn rakes his fingers through his hair and steeples them across his nose. Lorena would say he’s being purposefully obstinate, would tell him to be brave and let go, not of her but of mourning. He’s prone to rumination, a tendency only exacerbated by the cruelties that have marked his life since childhood. He knows Lorena used to pray for him over it, though he firmly believed he was damned regardless. _Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy. Qui tollis peccáta mundi, súscipe deprecatiónem, Thou Who takest away the sins of the world, receive our prayer. Dona nobis pacem, grant us peace._ Flynn only remembers a few lines of the traditional Latin mass she used to memorize, though being Lorena, she also had the Adhan, a few mantras, about half the Eshet Chayil, and plenty of secular poetry as well. He still hates himself for not bothering to learn any of the prayers for the dead while she was alive. After she and Iris died, he had played only Requiems for weeks until he made himself so miserable that he decided there were better ways to honor them than listening to funeral masses on loop. Lorena was one who chose to see God in every person and blessing in every act. She would tell him now to stop trying as usual to deny himself grace. 

He’s hunched in the same position on the couch when Mason shuffles blearily into the common room at 4:08 AM. Flynn doesn’t look up, but he hears the footsteps pause for a long moment, then restart, followed by banging in the kitchen and the sound of the tap. To Flynn’s surprise and alarm, Mason parks himself on the adjacent couch with a nonalcoholic midnight snack, setting a mug of yesterday’s coffee on the low table for himself and a tall glass of water for Flynn. He opens a package of chocolate chip cookies and points the mouth of the bag towards Flynn in silent offering. 

Flynn stares at Mason, unable to process what’s happening. Mason grabs two and shrugs as if to say fine, more for him, and sits back to eat his cookies. Flynn reaches warily for his water, and it feels like bliss as it slides down his parched throat. He drains the glass and puts it back on the table, wiping his hand across his mouth, actually feeling slightly better. He has no idea what’s supposed to happen next at this picnic, but Mason nudges the cookies towards him again, and this time Flynn takes one. He’s puzzled and pensive and letting a chocolate chip melt on his tongue when Mason starts to speak. 

“You know,” Mason says slowly, “I’ve been thinking a lot about quantum entanglement lately. It occurs when two or more particles exist in a closed system, interacting in such a way that it is impossible to describe their quantum states independent of one another.” He’s not looking at Flynn, but his voice is low and soothing, pitched as if to gentle a spooked horse or a crying child. 

“Measuring the state – say the spin or polarization – of one entangled particle appears to affect its partners even if they are separated over great distances, and the particles seem to instantaneously adjust to preserve their complementarity. Measuring the same entangled particles in different ways reveals that all possible states are in fact realized, our first proof that physical systems needn’t have definite properties and may actually branch into opposing historical trajectories. Entangled history is essentially a version of Schrödinger’s cat in which the poor feline is both alive and dead at the same time, just in different worlds.”

Flynn’s losing the plot, and the word entanglement is calling up images of strangler figs and Celtic knots and now housecats, which he’s fairly sure is not what Mason is actually describing. But this is a soliloquy which doesn’t require an audience, and Flynn knows what Mason is trying to do for him in the most Mason way imaginable. 

“The many-worlds interpretation is a popular decoherence interpretation, wherein all possible alternatives occur simultaneously in divergent parallel universes. For us, it would mean that each altered timeline doesn’t in fact replace the original but splits off from it, bifurcating with each change to history such that the Lifeboat never returns to the timeline that it left from. Now, metaphysics isn’t my forte, but the Buddhists had all this down several thousand years ago, and they also believed that the worlds themselves were not only superimposed, but entangled as well. Pushing on the end of one world – in their case through merit and in our case through making jumps – could have an effect at the far edge of another.”

Mason seems content to continue for as long as his coffee keeps him awake, and Flynn doesn’t have it in him to refuse the company even as the monologue veers into increasingly dodgy speculation on the relationship between time travel and reincarnation. Flynn takes another cookie and makes himself comfortable. He lets Mason’s stream-of-consciousness wash over him, and finds a touch of grace in the kindness.


	4. Post-Mrs. Sherlock Holmes

The bunker is unusually quiet in the hours following the team’s return from 1919. At the tail end of a subdued dinner, Flynn almost makes a comment about the calm before the storm, not knowing how prescient that would turn out to be. He limits himself to mental commentary though, and the short silence sees Wyatt and Jessica retreating to their room, doubtless to avoid more triangle awkwardness with Lucy. Rufus the Brave gets up with a groan to replace his thawing ice pack and returns to the couch to watch reruns of _That 70’s Show_ and nurse his bruised ribs. Jiya follows with a noise of sympathy, having already teased him for thinking he could win a fistfight against a cop. Flynn rolls his eyes but tosses the communal Advil bottle to Rufus, advising him to take a few more painkillers if he wants to be able to get up in the morning. Honestly. This job is like corralling preschoolers who think they’re superheroes. 

Mason yawns and announces that he’s turning in for the night. It’s comically early, but this is not uncommon, as Mason has the sleep schedule of a bat with insomnia who also happens to be prone to fits of savant-like technological innovation, a combination which often results in back-to-back all-nighters that would put any university student to shame. The man appears to regulate his circadian rhythm exclusively through the use of alcohol (metabolic depressant, sleep aid, solace in a bottle) and caffeine (neural stimulant, performance-enhancer, gloriously legal and unregulated psychopharmaceutical), and Flynn is duly impressed that neither Mason’s liver nor his brain have quit under the strain. Flynn distantly recalls learning that the lethal dose for coffee is in the range of 50-100 cups, and he takes a moment to appreciate the wisdom in Agent Christopher denying Mason’s request for pure caffeine pills. 

Lucy is stalled at the table clutching at that locket of hers, mutely frowning into the middle-distance like she has for most of dinner. Continuing to brood about Alice Paul, if Flynn isn’t mistaken, though the tension between her and Wyatt is more obvious and stifling than ever, hooray. If this isn’t preschool, it’s definitely no better than high school. Sometimes Flynn feels about a hundred years old compared to these kids. (Though he has to admit, they’ve grown up quickly in most of the ways that count. Lucy and Jiya and Rufus in particular, civilians dropped into the madness that is this interchronological war.)

In affirmation of his old-man status, Flynn gets up to make a cup of chamomile for himself and chooses a mint tea for Lucy. She looks exhausted and forlorn and lonely, once again the only one who truly appreciates the magnitude of the loss. Based on that crease between her eyebrows, she won’t be attempting sleep anytime soon. Still, decaf. 

Flynn sets the kettle on the stove with the whistle piece raised so it won’t startle her when it boils. He hates the screaming anyways. Something about the sound makes him want to crawl out of his skin, worse than nails on a chalkboard, and he’s always been annoyed at himself for it. What kind of highly-trained, time-traveling, Rittenhouse-slaying operative shudders at the sound of a kitchen kettle? 

When the mugs and teabags and honeypot are lined up, all that’s left to do is lean on the counter and study the back of Lucy’s head, the sorry slump of her shoulders. She constantly drinks tea in the chill of the bunker, so this must be an especially bad day if she hasn’t moved to get herself a cup. She’s starting to shiver. Flynn knows that Lucy is an adult who is entitled to her emotions and a little self-pity, but hot tea surely couldn’t come amiss. At the very least it’s healthier than vodka, and for her sake Flynn would really rather this not turn into a misery-drinking kind of night. 

Between the ibuprofen and the peppermint and all the internal fussing, Flynn is feeling a bit like a mother hen. Or a father, his brain supplies unhelpfully. Or a friend, he counters, and that catches him off-guard. The last few years, dealing with people meant colluding with or hiring or killing them, whichever was most expedient. Making friends led inevitably to betrayal. But living in this ridiculous dugout dormitory, it seems he’s recovering the ability to deal with people by working with them, knowing them, looking after them. Once upon a time it was a reflex – save villagers in Kosovo, bring Lorena flowers, tie Iris’ tiny shoelaces – and now, entirely without his consent, the instinct to care for others is coming back to rest in his body and his bones.

The water rumbles to a rolling boil, bringing Flynn out of a daydream in which he takes Lucy by the hand and leads her back to his room, just to tuck her into a real bed for the night. He turns off the stove, shaking his head at himself, and pours the hot water into their waiting mugs. A cloud of herbal steam rises like incense, and Flynn inhales deeply before walking over and setting Lucy’s mug in front of her as unobtrusively as he can. She starts anyway, stares at the tea as if trying to figure out where it came from, then looks up and notices him sliding back into his chair with his own mug. 

“Thank you,” she says. She blinks owlishly at him, clearly still far away, but it makes his heart funny all the same. 

Flynn clears his throat and nods at her hands coming up to wrap around the mug. “Your fingers are actually turning blue, Lucy.” It seems safer to address the ever-present chill than the brooding. He hopes he looks mildly concerned and not noticeably smitten. 

“Reynauld’s,” is all Lucy says. 

Flynn opens his mouth and closes it again. He’s not quite sure how to formulate an appropriate response, mainly because he has no idea what she’s talking about. Good to see his rusty social skills haven’t improved past the point of no return. 

As it happens, he doesn’t have to say anything, because she spaces back out for a second, then abruptly stands, picks up her tea, and sort of sleepwalks down the corridor in the direction of her and Jiya’s room. Flynn watches until she turns the corner, and then he’s just staring at the spot where she disappeared from view. 

“Dude, you know we can all see you staring at her.” 

Flynn snaps his head around to see Rufus and Jiya watching unabashedly from the couch. Evidently, they’ve decided not to be afraid of him anymore and are moving straight to calling him out. 

Flynn scowls. “I can simply kill you next mission, Rufus.” 

“Yeah but you won’t,” Rufus says confidently. 

Well. He had Flynn there.

“I think it’s sweet he made her tea,” Jiya says to Rufus. She turns to Flynn and looks him over appraisingly. “It brings out the non-killer side in you.” 

Good Lord. Flynn was totally unprepared for the reality of this team. He isn’t too proud to admit that while he knew the journal almost better than he knew his own mind, it did not make him in any way ready for the living, breathing, backtalking people before him now. What a long way they’ve come from breaking him out of solitary against everyone's better judgment solely because they needed him for intel. Still, his tenure in the bunker is technically purely professional and obviously remains conditional upon good behavior, so Flynn is yet more unprepared (if that were even possible) for how he genuinely wants to stay. 

So he smiles indulgently at Jiya. “Thank you. Assassins are people too, you know.”

Jiya grins at him. “I know.” She looks delighted at the dark little joke, pleased to discover that even Garcia Flynn can be self-deprecating. After a moment her expression turns thoughtful, and she tilts her head to consider him, or more likely consider the advisability of saying whatever it is that just occurred to her. Remembering that he’s perfectly harmless, she gets up from the couch and crosses to him, reaching a hand out and stopping just short of placing her fingertips on his arm. “Flynn, you know I know, right?” 

Jiya looks sympathetic, and she is treating him more gently than she ever has before, but for the life of him he hasn’t a clue what she means. What does Jiya know? Is this an oracle thing? Because there is a vast number of things he would prefer she never knows about him. He’s mystified, and it must show on his face because she smiles, a spot of amusement at his expense, but mostly the same inexplicable tenderness.

“You’re people too,” Jiya says. “We know you’re a person, not just a killer.” 

At that, Flynn’s eyes widen. Jiya smiles almost shyly at him, and satisfied that he’s caught on, she goes back to the couch to collect Rufus. She gives Rufus a hand getting up, and he drapes his arm across her shoulders, wincing as the movement strains his injured ribs. 

“Thanks for saving my ass today, Flynn,” Rufus says as they walk past him.

“Night,” Jiya adds warmly, and Flynn watches them disappear much like he did Lucy. 

Purely professional or not, Flynn is coming to realize that these people have hopelessly entwined personal lives and absolutely no ability to compartmentalize, meaning it’s not actually possible to live here without becoming ensnared himself. Whether or not that’s a good thing remains an open question. He wasn’t looking for a home of any sort, not after his last one was so neatly destroyed. Didn’t expect it, didn’t want it, knew for a fact that they didn’t want him, at least in the beginning. Not that leaving is an option. There are still days when he feels like he’s cheating on his family, but he can’t help the way that having this base and this team grounds him. 

It’s infinitely preferable to being on the run or locked up in prison, lifestyles which were doable but very difficult. Bunker living could be described much the same way, except for the notable perks of always having food and shelter and even companionship from people who could mostly be relied on not to kill each other. It’s not a high bar to clear, but Flynn is tired of being thrown from one unpredictable world to another according to the whims of Rittenhouse. Just because he has a high tolerance for upheaval and danger and pain, doesn’t mean he enjoys it. So here he is, against all odds the newest member of the Time Team with a doomsday burrow to call his own, a few sets of clothes, and even a couple of books to his name. Nothing he couldn’t leave behind in a fire, but things he’d sooner hold on to all the same.

There are many, many complications to joining a team that’s already so complicated – a Delta Force soldier and his undead wife, a prodigy with visions and her time-machine piloting boyfriend, the man who built said time machine on Rittenhouse dime, _Lucy_ , and the DHS Agent who put Flynn in prison? It’s a volatile mix. But the team has grudgingly shared their world with him, accepting his claim on the longer couch, inviting him to use their libraries, advising him to avoid the storage closet with the seventy-year-old chemicals and gas masks. He learns to be patient with them too, now that they are fighting Rittenhouse in earnest. He makes extra coffee for Rufus and Jiya, helps Lucy hand-wash and preserve historical clothing, and orders three times the amount of cereal he usually would because he knows everyone is eating his. 

In this way, he is slowly but surely bound to them – like it or not, as Lucy had said – with never a possibility of extrication. In this way, his world expands to include these precious seven, and maybe this is what Mason meant by entanglement. It’s not a lot, especially given the enmity from Wyatt and the consequential distance from Jessica and the very thin ice Christopher has him on, but it’s about seven hundred percent more than he had before. They’re a few months into their cohabitation experiment, and Flynn now finds the banalities of bunker life improbably, implausibly comforting. Some ancient instinct inside him hums with pleasure as he settles into his place, and it quenches a bit of the anger that had driven him for so long.

Flynn is surprised when Lucy reappears in the hall, hugging her pillow to her chest. This time he does get up. He intercepts her before she reaches the uncomfortable couch and lightly tugs the pillow from her grasp, tucking it under his own arm. She doesn’t protest, just looks up at him sadly, and he puts a hand on her shoulder to gently steer her back down the hallway.


	5. Post-The Day Reagan was Shot

Lucy looks distinctly like she’s regretting ever asking about the journal, not bothering to hide the slightly wild air of dawning existential dread that says she’s about to bolt. Her hand clenches and unclenches around Christopher’s flash drive and her eyes dart around the room, searching for an anchor but avoiding Flynn. She gets as far as a false start before realizing there’s nowhere to run in an underground bunker.

Flynn can practically see her brain whipping itself into a frenzy and he wonders if he should back off a little so she can process, but then he remembers this is his room and it would be absurd to kick himself out. The quandary solves itself when Lucy turns smartly and drops onto his bunk, falling backwards with a heavy thump and just barely avoiding hitting her head on the far wall. Okay then. Not what he was expecting, but he can work with it. 

She has one arm flung over her face, and actually it gives him a rare opportunity to study her without her studying him back, so he takes a minute to do a quick inventory. She’s showered and changed and her hair, which is fanned out around her head, smells amazing in that distractingly fruity way only women seem able to achieve. It doesn’t look like she’s sustained any injuries from the mission, not that she would let on if she did, and physically the only concerning thing is how thin she’s gotten from missing meals. Mental trauma a bit trickier to gauge. In general, everyone is miserable, which makes a change in intensity hard to judge, especially with Lucy. She’s obviously upset by the conversation they just had, but, Flynn realizes, maybe not upset at him. She’s lying on his bed, after all. 

Her sweater has ridden up just enough to reveal a pale sliver of skin, and Flynn edges a few inches away, tightening the reins on his self-control and trying to re-focus on what Lucy needs.

“Say something reassuring.” The words are muffled beneath her arm, but a plaintive note has crept into her voice.

Flynn says the first thing he can think of. “You don’t die in the next five years.” 

He closes his eyes and swears internally at himself. “Ah, you save my life, actually.” 

At that, Lucy uncovers her eyes. 

“You learn to pilot the Lifeboat,” Flynn coaxes. He’s running out of ideas, and Lucy’s just staring at the ceiling, her face ominously devoid of expression. 

“I made chicken paprikash for dinner?” he tries. 

Lucy finally cracks a smile, thank God, but she otherwise remains motionless, showing no signs of recovery from this latest bout of time-travel-related mindbending. Given how much they muck around in the past, and even given the prophecies inscribed in the journal, it’s still remarkably difficult to submit to the uncertainty that is the future. 

Flynn decides to let her be, and he retrieves _Solaris_ from his desk before sitting a respectable distance from Lucy on the bed. He’s too tall to lie horizontally on the cot like her, so he scoots back to prop himself up against the wall, using his thin pillow for marginally effective lumbar support. He means to read a few more pages before going to put their promised dinner in the oven, but barely gets through a paragraph before his memories pull him under.

Two weeks after Lorena and Iris are killed, and Flynn is alone and suicidal, no point in being delicate about it. He had given up that tenacious attachment to existence that characterized so much of his battle for a peaceful life, and the anticipation of death lay claim to him as nothing else had before, he supposed because there would be no after. Lucy’s journal had sat untouched on his kitchen table for almost a month while he circled it warily, deliberately staying in the limbo of having nothing left to lose while he debated with himself over whether or not to rejoin the world of the living. Anything that didn’t mean anything was stripped away, and he understood in a moment of clarity that picking up the journal would force him to take responsibility for his life in a way he never had to before. He would have to choose it, and make it count. 

Once he’d decided, he’d been happy to dive into the chaos. He worked himself to the bone, punished himself, paid penance for his family, suffered willingly and enthusiastically even, knowing he would never be able to atone. Back then he was wound so tightly, stunned by the shock of Lucy working for the other side, barely surviving in the perilous liminal space outside of society and under the radar and between centuries, between worlds. The singleminded pursuit of Rittenhouse took him over to the point where he felt out of control, rigging explosives in that basement and not knowing how to stop. Death would have been easy though, and he believed he deserved worse. 

He sometimes still believes it, but with Lucy here, it’s easier all the time to believe in her instead. In her beneficence and her humanity, in the ferocious way she fights to protect those virtues in herself and everyone around her. 

Flynn looks over at her and sees that her eyes have closed and her breathing has evened out, tranquil and untroubled at rest. Her hands clasp loosely over her stomach, and her head is turned to face him, almost seeking. With the advent of Lucy, he’s started to let things matter again. It's exquisite and terrifying, losing control in order to care, allowing the mundane and the astonishing to touch him once more. Loving her. 

Lucy stirs beside him, her nose wrinkling as she yawns. The long exhale that follows sounds contented, not defeated, and for a moment all is well.

“Flynn?”

“Mm, I’m here.”

Lucy opens her eyes and looks up at him. “Is there really chicken paprikash?” 

Flynn smiles, helpless to stop the adoration that must be written plain on his face. “It just needs to finish in the oven.” He slides off the bed, tossing his book aside and holding his hand out to her. “Come on, I’ll even make you a cup of tea.”

Lucy takes his hand easily and lets him haul her to her feet.

They walk down the hall to the kitchen together, and Flynn flips the oven on to preheat as Lucy fills the kettle and sets it to boil. She takes down mugs and rifles through their tea collection while Flynn gets the chicken out of the fridge. When they turn back toward each other, he sees his favorite English Breakfast on the counter and she sees the massive amount of food he prepared while the team was in 1981. Twenty-eight pieces of assorted chicken parts in cheerful red sauce are crammed neatly into the two biggest sauté pans he could find, sturdy industrial cookware meant to feed a bunker full of soldiers.

“Whoa.” Lucy’s eyebrows climb to her hairline. “Is that like six entire birds?”

It’s not, but Flynn grins at her and shrugs. “I made enough for everyone.”

“That’s suspiciously nice of you,” Lucy observes, amused. 

“Just keeping you on your toes.”

Flynn adds a few final touches, then nudges Lucy aside and loads the pans into the oven. Lucy reaches across him for the kettle and pours them tea, adding milk to both and sugar to his before handing him his cup. They head to the common area and lower themselves onto the couch in almost perfect unison, settling in to wait on dinner, and Flynn feels it right then, a surge of the inexplicable connection that hums between them. He recognizes it for the thread that pulled him back from cliff’s edge nearly four years ago, and the current of the deepening accord they’re forging now. 

He loves her. God, how he loves her, and the universe seems bent on reminding them that love doesn’t in fact conquer all, but Flynn already knows better than to believe in soulmates or meant-to-be or two people becoming one. Damaged as he is, he can’t afford to lose more of himself, even in Lucy. And yet, as she sits beside him smiling over the rim of her mug, there’s nevertheless something unbearably, wonderfully, recklessly tempting about the thought of letting her have everything he’s got. Just for safekeeping.


	6. Post-The General

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To complete this series, some Flynner monologue for 2x09. I couldn't get Wyatt and Flynn to talk more, so honestly not sure what happened here, but I had an interesting time writing it.

“Congratulations, by the way. Lucy gave me the news. You’re gonna be a great father.” 

Flynn stands there awkwardly, and Wyatt gives him a look as if he thinks Flynn is trying to jinx him before nodding stiffly and stalking down the hallway. Rufus looks like he can’t believe that Flynn actually said that, as usual. 

Flynn feels a sort of low-grade irritation, and it’s not like being nice to Wyatt or even talking to him has ever worked before, but Wyatt’s having a kid and Flynn just thought congratulations were in order. Or congratulations _would_ be in order if they weren’t completely forgoing the etiquette and social niceties that make normal societies (or government bunkers) function at least semi-smoothly. 

What was he supposed to say, anyway? It’s not like it would make things better if he opened with _So, I heard you knocked up your wife but she’s probably faking it because she’s a Rittenhouse spy and you’re the blind idiot she’s been conning for months, thanks for bringing her to our top-secret secure safehouse._ That would go over well.

Flynn sighs. He needs to change and wash off the Civil War, but he’s always last to shower. After that first trip to Salem, when it was still extra clear that he was the lowest ranking person in the bunker, no one had cared if there was hot water left for him. The unspoken order stuck, and he knew it wasn’t worth getting worked up over. He stays in the kitchen and broods instead. 

Lucy told him about the pictures on the way to Port Royal. She was sad and silent for most of the ride, and Flynn was just about to ask what the matter was when she screwed up her face and blurted everything out about the pregnancy and the pictures and even about her and Wyatt. She finally admitted how wounded and angry she was, and it pissed Flynn off to no end that Wyatt couldn’t seem to stop hurting her. What she needed was a bear hug and a stiff drink and some proper rest. Or maybe a punching bag and a good cry. Flynn isn’t exactly sure of her style yet, but all he could do right then was stop their horses at a little creek, help her down from her mount, and bring her some water to drink and to wash her face with before they had to meet the colonel. He’s proud, though he has absolutely no right to be, of how she pulled it together to face Colonel Montgomery with levelheaded composure and cool rationality. 

But while the news of the pregnancy clearly distresses Lucy, it barely registers as something that should require Flynn’s attention. On the matter of Wyatt’s impending parenthood, he feels curiously empty. Not a single twinge of jealously or felicity or annoyance. It’s not like Flynn is emotionally invested in Wyatt and Jessica’s resurrected marriage or possibly growing family, but he was an expectant father once, and he remembers how delighted and how petrified he was. The pure joy and the abject terror, the feeling that he would vibrate right out of his skin, whether from anxiety or anticipation it wasn’t always clear. Feeling nothing at all seems like a bad sign. 

As for Jessica, they had never really gotten past the small talk stage for obvious reasons, but she appeared to be a perfectly agreeable person, shrewdly observant from her bartending work, though profoundly misguided in her taste in men. She was helpful and unfussy and took her coffee with three sugars, no cream. In other words, she was a normal non-Rittenhouse civilian, and Flynn somewhat disappointedly recalibrates with a substantial increase in suspicion. There’s an involuntary flare of hatred towards Rittenhouse, but with a few deliberate breaths, Flynn lets it pass. 

Honestly, Flynn is trying to be better, he is. The death traps, the homicides, the bombings…it was a bad coping mechanism. A person can live on anger only so long, and only so well. Carrying resentment and wrath took a steep, steep toll, and it turned love for his family into vengeance into violence. The rage backed him into a corner and drained him of his humanity, and for more than two years he couldn't separate it from the quest Lucy had handed him or the desperate hope that he could bring Lorena and Iris back. 

He’s crawling out of that rabbit hole now, but the way that things are going he’s probably on his ninth life already. If he can’t do anything about his likely imminent demise, he can at least work on not being consumed with guilt or driven by fury in the meantime. Some of his interest in reform is wanting to be able to look himself in the mirror again. A not insignificant part of it is for Lucy; she’s shown him a better way, and he can’t reasonably hope for her to love him if he doesn’t even like himself, and she deserves someone who will be good for her. And really, he just doesn’t want to be so _angry_ anymore, so he’s making a concerted effort to be steadier, less scornful, less destructive. To congratulate people on their babies.

It’s a work in progress, but lately he’s been thinking that since burning down the world sure didn’t work, perhaps his energy should be spent on improving it instead. Perhaps he should be a person who does things for the sake of leaving the world closer to the world he would have wanted for Iris, closer to the world he wishes for Lucy and the members of this strange family. He sees the irony, of course he does, and he’s not entirely convinced that this isn’t a fool’s errand given the war on Rittenhouse, but he’s trying on the idea of being good anyway. And, well, he’s done this sort of thing once before, back when it was Lorena who was pregnant.

He actually still thought he was a halfway decent person back then, give or take the occasional classified mission, but he was so scared that he wouldn’t be a good father. He had fought in too many wars, had worked in gray areas for too long, had never dealt with the specter of his own father, who was apparently reaching out from beyond the grave to make him doubt himself. There was no way Flynn would have been qualified to adopt a child, so he had no idea what made him think he should produce one. On those abject terror days, he couldn’t come up with a single scenario in which he didn’t completely screw the kid up for life.

Flynn had never explicitly said any of this to Lorena, but she had known. In her optimistic and remarkably pragmatic way, she’d determined that the thing to do was to literally practice not screwing up. She told him to get over himself, and then made him do nice things for other people to prove to himself that he could be giving, and attentive, and kind. _Be brave_ , she said. For it takes strength to be compassionate and courage to be vulnerable. _Kill ‘em with kindness_ , she said, joking for his benefit, but he heard the direct order in her tone, the underlying gravity fit for an eleventh Commandment. _Go ahead and love people_.

And he thought, could it really be that simple? 

So he learned his coworkers’ birthdays and offered to help his friends move and complimented his neighbor’s novelty ties. He did a fair amount of getting over himself and did his best to give people second chances. On the weekends he and Lorena baked pies for her to take to church and give to whoever looked like they could use one, and that spring they planted irises all along their front yard, sharing the flowers’ vibrancy and cheer with anyone who walked by. He found that although it did take some determination, it wasn’t nearly as hard as he had thought. By the time Iris was born, Flynn was certain he was doing everything he could to be the best father he could, and he knew she would teach him the rest. 

Now Flynn wonders if it would work again. Not the fathering, but the kindness. The most difficult part before was mental, struggling against his expectations that he’d be an abysmal father and subverting what would have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. He wonders if choosing kindness now could be the antidote to his anger, could let him be someone who helps instead of hurts, and could maybe even solve the more immediate Wyatt hating his guts situation. At the very least killing Wyatt with kindness would confuse the hell out of him, so there’s really no downside. 

Flynn gets up from the kitchen table and pulls the refrigerator door open. Team dinner was a success the other day, and no one had anything to eat on mission, so a hot meal seems like a good peace offering. Another thing he learned from Iris – people get grumpy when they’re hungry. Maybe some food would smooth out all the tensions on the team and make Wyatt feel like he doesn’t have to be so defensive. Maybe it would calm Rufus and Jiya down about the cowboy visions for a couple of hours. Maybe what Lucy actually needs for her melancholy is lasagna. Flynn cranes his neck down to see what they’ve got in stock.


End file.
